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“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” ― Paul Krugman

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Hi, I'm Bret. I'm a very Progressive Liberal. I believe in the truth behind science and mathematics. I believe supposed "creationists" are just too ignorant to understand actual science, and fall back to their magic storybook because real science is too hard for their itsy-bitsy lizard brains. I believe in equality for all people; straight, gay, bi, trans, white, black, brown it does not matter. We are all humans on this Earth for a limited time. Celebrate diversity and enjoy with other's bring to your life. End of story. ;-)

Monday, November 16, 2009

By Amanda Marcotte

Pandagon.net

So the news came out today that the FBI got a warning a month prior that Scott Roeder was a danger to Dr. George Tiller. The FBI disregarded the letter as not credible, for a number of reasons, including the fact that the guy who wrote it had no specifics. But it’s also likely that the FBI was annoyed because the letter came from a personal enemy of Roeder’s, a Mark Archer. Archer’s wife had a baby by Roeder after she married Archer, and Roeder had managed to secure visitation rights. For somewhat understandable reasons, Archer didn’t want Roeder visiting the little girl---the story implies that Archer is raising the little girl as his own, and the Archers want to get Roeder out of their life completely. Of course, the strategy of trying to run someone out of your life by getting him on a “no fly” list is unethical, but it seems that Archer was also freaked out by Roeder, who bragged to Archer’s wife that he wanted to blow up abortion clinics.

Now, I know the FBI probably gets a ton of people trying to use them in order to attack personal enemies, and as such, they probably just write most of this stuff right away. But since this letter was inspired by a custody dispute, I think perhaps they should have had more follow-up. Custody disputes should be a red flag for violence, in no small part because of the right wing’s growing interest in using child custody issues as a way to oppress and control women. The anti-choice movement attracts a lot of angry, bitter men with major masculinity issues and bitterness over divorce and the loss of control over the lives of specific women they feel they have a claim to, and that sort of thing needs to be taken into consideration when warnings like this are issued.

Of course, angry, violent, bitter men don’t need to go into anti-choice activism to work out their violent hatred of women, because now they have the “men’s rights” movement. And while individual MRAs (men’s rights activists) might be seriously anti-choice, the movement on the whole tends to be neutral on abortion, because they aren’t particularly anti-sex. Indeed, MRAs tend to be more concerned about the fact that men don’t have a right to force women to have abortions than the fact that legal abortion exists....(Remainder.)